Stefano Zacchiroli received an
O'Reilly
Open Source Award
at OSCON for his contributions to Debian and the FOSS community.
Stefano served as Debian Project Leader (DPL) for three years.
He currently serves on the board of the Open Source Initiative and is a
researcher at IRILL in Paris.

Cyril Brulebois
announced
that the first Alpha version of the installer for Debian 9 Stretch
had been released. Shortly afterward the second version
was released live from the DebConf Birthday Party in Heidelberg, Germany. He posted on his blog
a quick recap of the beginning of the development cycle of the installer for Stretch, and announced
that the migration to testing of packages producing the special udeb
packages used by the installer would be frozen just before the release of
a new version of the installer. He also asks the maintainers of packages
with potential changes to the installer for coordination through the
debian-boot mailing list.

Joerg Jaspert announced
that support for the SPARC architecture
has been removed from the official archive.
The support of SPARC was introduced with Debian 2.1 Slink.
Andrew Carter shared his memories
of SPARC in Debian.
He also announced
that due to disk space limitations on mirror hosts, the non-LTS
architectures of Squeeze were removed from the mirror network. Squeeze i386/amd64
will continue to be hosted on the normal mirrors, while the whole of Squeeze is
available at archive.debian.org.

Steve McIntyre announced
on his blog the creation of a
UEFI team in Debian,
using the freshly opened #debian-uefi IRC channel on
irc.debian.org. The team is welcoming new members interested in
helping with these packages and UEFI in general.
Steve also reported the beginning of a
cross-distribution
effort to track broken UEFI implementations. If you have a particular UEFI
horror story, add details to
the dedicated wiki
page.

James Valleroy
announced
the release of FreedomBox version 0.5. The
FreedomBox Project
is a community effort to develop, design, and promote personal servers
based on Debian running free software for private personal communications.
More information about this version is available in the
release notes.

Jonathan Wiltshire sent a message
about the way package maintainers can help the transition to GCC5 and
libstdc++6, which can be tracked on the
transition tracker. They
are asked to defer uploads to unstable where possible, unless they are
related to this transition - for example, fixing a FTBFS with GCC5, or other
RC bugs to unblock migration, or related to the libstdc++ follow-up transitions.
They are welcome to work in experimental in the meantime.
Matthias Klose focused on the transition for
the libstdc++6 ABI with an emphasis on what should be done, or not!

Niko Tyni announced a Perl transition to Perl 5.22, expected in the
next couple of months. Perl 5.22 packages have been in experimental since
June, and the list of blockers is getting shorter.
Some changes occurred in the organisation of the binary packages built from
src:perl version 5.22 in experimental to allow for keeping older versions of
libperl5.xx installable, and for marking them Multi-Arch:same so that they
can be co-installed for multiple architectures. In order not to increase the
number of packages, the non-essential parts of the standard library have been
integrated into the libperl5.xx package. As a side effect, installing
libperl5.xx now installs the full Perl standard library.

The Wanna
Build team met at DebCamp welcoming Joachim Breitner as a new member.
They quickly got to work on getting arch:all packages buildable with their
autobuilders, and they remind developers that they are available if a package
does not make it through the ftp-master archive. The team continuted work on
merging buildd.debian-ports.org into buildd.debian.org, and did a front end
update to the buildd status pages.
The team also focused on rsync based uploads from the buildds, upgraded their
autobuilders to Jessie and discussed package archives for project members. The
team plans to work on cross build dependencies, workflow regarding communication
between the autobuilders, and working toward stateless autobuilders.
The team gives special thanks to the DSA and ftp-master teams.

Simon Kainz
announced
and updated the weekly DUCK challenge
to help find, fix, and upload packages with DUCK issues before the end of DebConf15.
Prizes and notoriety aside, the tallies for
Week 1:
10 fixes and uploads.
Week 2:
15 fixes and uploads.
Week 3:
10 fixes and uploads, with an impressive pause to acknowledge 35 packages
by 25 different people thus far.
Week 4:
14 fixes and uploads.

Gregor Herrmann reported
on RC bugs worked on in early July as part of the
GCC5 transition, and work with the Debian Perl Group's upstream releases.

Niels Thykier worked in the background on Lintian and applied some performance
tuning, with the output monitoring process being made available
on-line. The set of changes, such as an increase in buffer size, along
with various memory optimisations, brought memory
consumption down 33%. A second
tuning concentrated on field definitions which
further reduced memory use and when applied saw reductions in size for
libreoffice and chromium at 55% and 61% respectively.

The Reproducible Builds team is proud to report
on over 65 packages fixed in the 17th week of the Stretch cycle; they also share their talk
given at DebConf15 and their
roundtable.

Freexian, sponsor of Debian Long Term Support (LTS), highlighted
73.50 work hours in their June report
and 79.50 work hours in their July
2015 report, spread in each case among 7 paid
contributors. July's work listed 20 packages awaiting an update with about 22
packages in a vulnerable state, down from 33 the previous month. During DebConf15
LTS was featured in a talk, and video is available of two presentations:
LTS Past, Present, and Future and Preparing for Wheezy LTS.

Raphaël Hertzog reported on 15 hours of paid support working on Debian LTS and
his jump ahead to the future to work on Kali Linux / Debian Stretch. The work
with Kali Linux is to parallel Debian Constantly Usable Testing with a rolling
release cycle and snapshot for every 4 months toward 3 releases per year. Bugs
closed on the Kali side of work benefited Debian with improvements to APT,
upstream requests for nvidia drivers, and the investigation of a schroot
issue. In his other time Raphaël sponsored packages, uploaded his own
packages, and worked on the Distro Tracker.

Carl
Chenet worked on Retweet, a Twitter bot that automatically
re-tweets posts, nearly completed the full localisation of
Le Journal du hacker into
French, and submitted a pull request for additional sources for
planet.sysadmin-fr.org. Carl also worked on several bug reports for
Dockier.io and Backupchecker.

Antonio Terceiro introduced
his readers to Elixir and plans for its use in
Debian; interested parties are encouraged to join or hang around in #debian-elixir
on irc.debian.org. Antonio helped organise a MiniDebconf in
Porto Alegre which targeted bringing more participants into Debian; he spoke
about What is Debian, and how it works and packaging free software. Videos of
his talks are available here.
Antonio is also helping to organise
another MiniDebConf in October as part of Latinoware. Antonio also worked on the
transition to Ruby 2.2 as the default in Debian unstable, and uploaded
updates to unstable which reached testing.

Ritesh Raj Sarraf blogged on a few topics discussed at a Micro Debian Developers
meeting regarding cross compilation, licensing from the point of view of the
end user, and systemd. Container groups held a fair amount of discussion time
in consideration of how they work within systemd. He shares an example of
using systemd-nspawn as a replacement for Linux Containers (LXC).

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party?
Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events?
Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our
talks page?
Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.